Woman of Valor (8 page)

T
he Sangers arrived in New York in 1910 at a golden moment of political, intellectual, and cultural ferment. “The fiddles are tuning up all over America,” wrote the young critic, Van Wyck Brooks, capturing the spirit of a generation that had come of age in a new century and was convinced of its obligation to redefine the basic tenets of life in a manner coincident with the much ballyhooed significance of the calendar change. Nothing established was sacred any longer. In Washington, the “new nationalism” of Teddy Roosevelt and the “new freedom” of Woodrow Wilson distilled the nation's uncompromising faith in progress—in its ability to unite democratic aspirations with modern tools of management, to make government a force for the dissolution of unjust concentrations of wealth and capital and for the eradication of poverty. In cities across the country, reformers came to power to weed out decades of municipal corruption and graft, and politics only reflected a sweeping cultural rebellion against virtually all expressions of Victorian formality in thought, feeling, and behavior.

The century's turn inaugurated an era of innovation in the arts that produced such pioneer modernists as Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O'Neill, Isadora Duncan, T. S. Eliot, Georgia O'Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, and many more. Influenced by European movements away from the rigidly structured conventions of the nineteenth century, they, in turn, created an aesthetic tradition of their own that celebrated America's uniqueness as a haven for freedom of expression and identified wholesale cultural transformation as the necessary condition of the nation's continued social and political progress. Theirs was the credo of the favored philosopher of the day, William James—the pragmatist's faith in man's role as creator of his own future.

“We are living and will live all our lives in a revolutionary age, and nothing is so important as to be aware of it,” wrote the young Walter Lippmann. “The dynamics for a splendid human civilization are all about us.” With characteristic dispassion, a mature Lippman later recalled these years as a happy time: “The air was soft, and it was easy for a young man to believe in the inevitability of progress, in the perfectibility of man and of society, and in the sublimation of evil.” It was an innocent era, a “glorious intellectual playtime,” as the writer Floyd Dell remembered it—before war, revolution, and repression created the more sober reality of the century.
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Having dabbled in Socialist politics, and even as suburbanites attended party meetings in Yonkers, the Sangers joined New York City's active Socialist Party Local 5. In 1911, Bill ran for municipal alderman and received 352 votes, his candidacy serving as a vehicle to build party recognition and strength. Following the tragic fire that year at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, he put his professional skills to work for the cause by documenting the building code violations that contributed to the deaths of the young seamstresses who could not escape. Margaret was quickly recruited for the party's women's committee, but unsure of herself and uncertain of the strength of her comrades' interest in women's issues, she deferred to her husband. She later recalled that whenever she had an idea at a meeting, she would lean over and whisper it to him first, and then he would wave his hand enthusiastically, saying, “Have you heard Margaret? Margaret has something to say.”
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The attractive young couple became favored comrades, and to their uptown parlor flocked the leading young rebels and scoffers of the day, distinctions among them counting far less for the moment than their common vision of a better world for all. As Margaret remembered the scene, progressives working for protective labor legislation came together with parliamentarian Socialists looking to redress their grievances at the ballot box. New York trade unionists took on activists of the International Workers of the World, or Wobblies as they were better known, who advocated direct action to subvert production as a means of controlling wages and conditions of labor, rather than await orderly and peaceful unionization by craft. Impassioned anarchists heralded the coming of a day when the individual would reign supreme over all governments and laws.

The Sanger house was filled with powerful presences: Big Bill Haywood, the bullish IWW organizer who honed his political skills in the lumber mills and copper mines of the West; John Reed, the young reporter, like his classmate, Lippmann, just out of Harvard, and intent in his sympathies for direct action; Jessie Ashley, a young woman lawyer who gave her professional expertise and considerable family wealth to the cause, and made an incongruous pair with the coarse and flamboyant Haywood, her lover; the determined but gentle-natured anarchist, Alexander Berkman, only recently released from a fourteen-year prison sentence for his attempt on the life of industrialist Henry Clay Frick; and his more outspoken cohort, the indomitable Emma Goldman, whose brash manners Margaret never forgave, even as she absorbed her forceful doctrines of radicalism and feminism. As a measure of her own diffidence in those years, however, Margaret recalled that these people really came to see her husband, while she fixed the coffee and poured the cocoa.
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The Sangers became active Socialists in the movement's heyday, when, under the elegiac national leadership of Eugene Debs, the party contended for serious electoral status. In 1912, it polled almost 6 percent of the total vote and, Bill's experience aside, elected more than 1,000 Socialists to office, including hundreds of aldermen and councilmen, fifty-six mayors, and a United States Congressman, Victor Berger. For a brief time, at least, Socialism shared in the prevailing optimism of the times and fostered heterogeneity within its ranks.

What is more, Debs had long been known for his sentimental veneration of women and his ardent support of women's rights, and under his continued leadership the party initiated a self-conscious effort to mobilize women members in their own right. In 1908, what had long been a tradition of independent Socialist women's clubs was incorporated by edict directly into the national party machinery. During the next five years, millions of promotional pamphlets were distributed with individualized appeals to homemakers, laboring and professional women—from the recently unionized workers of the garment industry to department store salesgirls, teachers, and farm-wives. The party embraced the cause of women's suffrage as an organizing tool, and Margaret was hired to promote the vote for women. Socialist Party letterbooks from 1911 record her compliant distribution of meeting notices and leaflets, but this experience was also short-lived. She quickly came to view the effort as a low priority in the larger struggle of working women for economic and social justice.
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The formal movement for women's rights in this country had been founded years earlier, in 1848, at a convention held in the tranquil village of Seneca Falls, New York, where a broad and radical declaration of feminist principles was drawn with the nation's own Declaration of Independence as a model. Until 1920, when American women were finally enfranchised, they were granted little more than the most basic legal guarantees of personhood and property, their virtues tolerated only as symbols—their stewardship bounded by home and church—while a privileged fraternity guided the nation's advancement through an age of industrial development and geographic expansion.

The women who assembled as delegates at Seneca Falls had demanded equality of opportunity for men and women in affairs of state, church, and family. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the organizing force and intelligence behind this historic conclave, was an advanced and innovative thinker on women's issues, who understood the complex sources of sexual subordination and, in addition to the vote for women, advocated domestic reforms including the right of women to affirm their sexuality if they chose to do so, or contrarily, to refuse sexual relations altogether when necessary to avoid pregnancy. Stanton also supported cooperative child rearing, rights of property, child custody, and divorce. Though venerated within her own small circle, she came to be viewed by more traditional supporters as a source of potential controversy and embarrassment.
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Having achieved little progress in more than fifty years of lobbying, a new generation of women's rights advocates consciously altered its strategy by incorporating expedient, conciliatory arguments into the abstract, egalitarian rhetoric of the movement. The ballot for women was marketed as a logical extension of the obligations of wife and motherhood and inevitably the vote was won, not just as an inalienable right, but also as a practical tool for protecting and serving the family in a world where government and politics had taken on traditional responsibilities of the home, such as education and social welfare.
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The architects of that victory, women such as Stanton's more decorous colleague, Susan B. Anthony, or the considerably younger Carrie Chapman Catt, were made to confront the efforts of progressive Americans who were eager to translate their growing concern for the moral and social well-being of families into a broad public obligation. The family had come to be seen as nothing less than a guarantor of the basic understanding of authority and community that develops citizens for democratic self-rule. Viewed as a kind of school for civic life itself, it ranked as a social question of first importance—in the words of Teddy Roosevelt's annual message to Congress in 1905. The new President endorsed a ground-breaking government activism in the arena of social welfare on the theory that the modern industrial state might justifiably assume the role of “over-parent,” supplying housing, schooling, health and welfare services in the interest of stabilizing and securing family life. He carefully distinguished this rationale from the collectivist social goals advanced by more left-leaning thinkers of the day.

If the state were to protect the family, however, so the family would serve the state. Roosevelt roundly condemned the increasingly low birthrates of Americans, blaming the phenomenon on rampant egotism and selfishness. He especially deplored women who dared place individual aspirations over their paramount obligation to the perpetuation of family, class, and nation. A popular and voluble leader, he effectively translated these deeply held convictions into a national alarm about racial suicide and decline and gave credibility to supremacist social theory and to anti-immigrant prejudice, which fed on the differential fertility rates, however temporary, between native and foreign born. At the same time, he put women's rights advocates on the defensive and developed a political lobby to counter their efforts through such pronatalist measures as the celebration of Mother's Day and the promulgation of a federal income-tax deduction for children. As a result they had little interest in confusing the suffrage message with too much talk about what was going on in the nation's bedrooms. What possible value could be derived from calling more attention to sexuality and fertility as the critical matrix for defining gender relations?
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Even so advanced a feminist thinker as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, while disputing the suffragists' pragmatic strategies, shared their reticence of sex. Gilman's pioneering turn-of-the-century feminist tract,
Women and Economics
, condemned Victorian patriarchy and demanded that women move beyond the family as a principal source of identity. Her vision of social and economic parity, however, did not incorporate any explicit concern for sexuality and childbirth but instead condemned women to bear these private burdens in silence.

This was a strategic consideration. Twice married and the mother of one child, Gilman would later become a strong public advocate of birth control and an ally of Margaret Sanger. For many feminists well into the middle decades of this century, however, sexual control would remain an obligation of personal conduct and of public expression. They would simply never talk about sex. Indeed, in large numbers they would forgo marriage altogether, rather than risk losing their independence to husbands and children. They would listen to Charlotte Gilman condemn matrimony for denying women the opportunity of self-realization and watch the legendary social reformer, Jane Addams, show the world just how much good an unmarried, self-reliant woman might do. As teachers, physicians, social workers, writers, and artists, many would eschew personal fulfillment in favor of social commitment. Their androgynous vision would claim sexuality and family life as the price women must pay for equality, and they would remain silent in the debate over what contraception was doing to the nation's fertility. Indeed, the situation might have remained this way had Margaret, and others of her comrades on the political left, not experienced a growing estrangement from these priorities.
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Margaret's disenchantment with suffrage as a tool of empowerment for Socialist women also reflected her dramatically altered personal circumstances. Bill Sanger's new enthusiasm for left-wing politics apparently cost him his job in architecture, a notoriously conservative profession at this time, where a young man who was Jewish would have had little opportunity for advancement through traditional channels under any circumstances. Bill began to devote more and more of his time to painting, a personal interest of long-standing, and this pursuit of a purer aesthetic ideal left his family with no secure means of support. Margaret was forced to find paid work.

Beyond three children and a live-in mother-in-law, the Sangers were also helping Ethel Higgins, who had abandoned her husband and children in Corning and enrolled in nursing school at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. When she emerged with a coveted degree and tried to reclaim the children, she was taken to court by disapproving in-laws and lost permanent custody. Bill and Margaret helped with the legal expenses, and Ethel tried to repay her debt by finding her sister assignments as a relief nurse, which became more and more critical to everyone's well-being. Years later, Ethel's daughter, Olive, still remembered the affection Margaret extended to her during a visit to Corning in those lonely years: “I always thought of her as Christmas. She had red hair and sparkling green eyes, and she opened her arms to me and hugged me. Nobody had done that in a long time.”
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